"Though it doesn't
fully explore
the racial issues it raises as fully as it could have, for its time it
was daring and courageous."

Reviewed by Dennis Schwartz

The first of two film versions of Fannie Hurst's 1933 novel
(the
other was by Douglas Sirk in 1958, that one took a slightly different
direction
from Stahl's more faithful one to the book by making it more of a
social
confrontational work than the original's character study and one of
almost
unbelievable discretion). Imitation of Life was nominated for an Oscar
as Best Picture. The tearjerker was sensitively directed by John M.
Stahl
("Back Street"/"Leave Her to Heaven") and was one of the first films to
address real racial issues and have blacks star in serious dramatic
parts
in a contemporary urban setting. It was inspired by the popularity of
the
Aunt Jemima pancake company. Though it doesn't fully explore the racial
issues it raises as fully as it could have, for its time it was daring
and courageous. It also touches on a woman making it big in a man's
business
world by proving to be just as smart and the travails of single moms
raising
their daughters.

It chronicles the chance friendship between a struggling
white widow
Beatrice Pullman (Claudette Colbert) and an impoverished black maid
widow
Delilah Johnson (Louise Beavers). When Delilah comes by mistake to
Beatrice's
home looking for work, she gets hired as a live-in maid when she agrees
to work for cheap telling Mrs. P. she's only interested in getting a
nice
place for her daughter to live in. They both have young daughters, the
white woman's 2-year-old Baby Jessie and the black woman's same-aged
light-skinned
Peola. Even though Mrs. P. is having a tough time making ends meet
following
hubby's footsteps as a traveling salesman for maple syrup, she takes
Delilah
on. After enjoying Delilah's pancakes, Bea gets the secret recipe and
opens
up on the boardwalk a pancake shop. Business becomes a multi-million
dollar
franchised national one when a vagrant visitor to the pancake shop,
Elmer
Smith (Ned Sparks), gives her the idea to "box it." Bea puts Delilah's
likeness on the box and offers her a twenty percent share in the
business
(which in the movie passes for being generous, but it sure seems like a
ripoff since she stole the pancake recipe), but the black woman doesn't
want the money saying she just wants to be her maid (Bea instead banks
the money for her friend and keeps her on as a maid, though this whole
scenario smacks of exploitation). Elmer's rewarded with a general
manager's
position. At a house party celebrating the tenth anniversary of the
business,
there's a great shot of a staircase dividing the house into the
upstairs,
where the white Bea lives and the downstairs where the black Delilah
lives.
At the party Bea meets the handsome, smooth talking ichthyologist
Stephen
Archer, a friend of Elmer's, and they soon plan to marry. But Bea wants
her college daughter Jessie (Rochelle Hudson) to meet him first and
without
knowing their plans. When she returns from her college break, the three
get together. Delilah then asks Bea to go with her to Virginia, where
her
troubled daughter ran away from a Negro college and is passing for
white
while working in a restaurant that doesn't allow Negro patrons. Peola
(Fredi
Washington) hurts Delilah further by saying she doesn't know her, but
later
returns home to tell mom she disowns her and wants to be white (this is
played out to really mean she wants white opportunities). In an earlier
scene, when Peola was in grade school she was humiliated that her very
black mother came to school and now everyone knows that she was black.
When Bea returns, she finds out that the teenage Jessie is taken
romantically
with the 37-year-old Archer, even though he acted properly. The film
concludes
with the heart broken Delilah dying and requesting an elaborate funeral
(the only thing the saintly woman ever asked for herself), and a heart
sick Peola returns for the funeral and feels miserable over how selfish
she acted. Bea keeps her promise to her friend and looks after her, as
Peola agrees to return to college. Bea then puts off her wedding to
Archer
until she's sure that Jessie's love for him has vanished. He agrees to
wait when he sees he can't change her mind.

The liberal film manages to make its way through a
minefield of sincerity,
melodrama and racial divides from the America of the 1930s without
blowing
itself up, which was quite an achievement for a back then Hollywood
film--something
not to be sneered at.